The invention relates to an interface for coupling data from a realtime data feed into an application program.
A realtime data feed is any data source that provides the data on a realtime basis, that is, essentially as the data becomes available or soon thereafter. For example, the realtime data feed may be a public financial wire service, such as might be available from the New York Stock Exchange, Reuters or Knight-Ridder, that provides users with the most recent prices for stocks and trades. It may be a private financial data source that distributes financial data within a particular business or institution, such as a bank. Or, it may be a source of monitoring and control data generated by a manufacturing process within a company.
Frequently, it is desirable to analyze the data available from such data feeds to make buy or sell decisions for financial instruments, to decide other financial and/or management related issues, or to control manufacturing processes. For this purpose, there are commercially available applications that are programmed or can be programmed to perform the required analysis using data gathered from those data feeds. For example, there are spreadsheet programs, such as 1-2-3.TM. marketed by Lotus Development Corporation, that provide such data analysis capability. Often it is also desirable, if not necessary, to perform the analysis of the data from the data feeds as rapidly as possible, even on a time scale approaching the speed at which the data changes. To accomplish this, others have provided interfaces which funnel the data coming from the data feed directly into the application where it can be analyzed.